ACES 2007 School Quiz

Date: 4 Nov, 2007
Venue: Tilak Smarak Mandir
Organised by: Abhinava Vidyalaya, Pune and BCQC
Set by: BC quizzers, primarily Abhishek Nagaraj, Aditya Gadre, Salil Bijur, Shamanth Rao, and J. Ramanand,
Conducted by: Ramanand

Quiz Final Results
(40 IR questions + 1 theme + rapidfire)
1st: Abhinava Vidyalaya (F): 125
2nd: Kalmadi Shamrao (B): 110
3rd: SPM English (C): 75
Jt. 4th: Bal Shikshan Mandir (D): 50
Jt. 4th: Symbiosis Secondary (E): 50
6th: Modern (A): 15

(sadly, I left the paper with the names of finalists behind - if someone knows, please put in comments)

Report

* The 3rd ACES quiz was also the second time the BC was involved. The flavour of the quiz was sports + general
* Kalmadi Shamrao and Abhinava also had the best contingents, with about 6 teams from these schools missing out because of the only-one-team-per-school-in-finals rule. Perhaps a end of season Derby between these two teams should be held! They are clearly the two best quizzing schools in the city today.
* Though Kalmadi Shamrao chased Abhinava all the way, drawing level a couple of times after being far behind, Abhinava never lost the lead after picking it up in the end of the 1st quarter
* The organisation was excellent and smooth. Compared to last year, the turnout was very high, with about 60 teams from 15 schools showing up. The hall was packed during the finals with an enthusiastic audience.
* The quiz had a single "Aldus Manutius" theme round (images that spelt out the name of a sportsman, with five such sportsmen to be connected). A small rapid-fire "free throw" round was held for all teams, with one person coming forward to answer 4 questions each. There were four "quarters" in the quiz, each of 10 qns each.
* Last year's report. With this win, Abhinava successfully wrested back the ACES trophy which they lost to DES last time.
* Many thanks to Abhinava Principal Mrs. Pai, teacher-in-charge Mrs. Gandhi and the volunteer teachers and students for the fine show and the opportunity to do a quiz for school students.

Sample questions:
1. Stade de Gerland, Lyon. 3 June 1997. Brazil vs France. Score 1-1.Why is this match remembered?
2. This was invented by Allan Plaskett, an English computer scientist, who also invented another device called "Flightpath". It is pretty simple in practice, consisting of some radio antennae pointed at a particular kind of sportsperson. What is this?
3.She was born in Copenhagen in Denmark, which is where her father was stationed at the time. They later returned to their home-town of Mangalore. She would go on to make her movie debut in the film “Aishwarya” opposite Kannada superstar Upendra. Who?
Answers at the end of this post

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(Original Announcement)
Abhinava Vidyalaya E.M.H.S. along with BCQC is organising an inter-school quiz next week.

Details:
Date: 4th Dec 2007
Time: Elims at 9am, Finals at 10.30am
Venue: Tilak Smarak Mandir, Tilak Rd., Pune
Participation: Teams of 3. For school students only.
Entry: Please contact BCQC or the Abhinava Vidyalaya school office
Flavour: A sports heavy general quiz

(Answers to sample questions)
Roberto Carlos' famous curling free kick, Snickometer, Deepika Padukone

The BCQC Landmark Comics Quiz Report (18 Nov)

The quiz was successfully held on Saturday for an audience of about 40-50 people. These consisted of ages from about 10 years to vannila-flavoured adults, housewives to students to dentists to one size fits all software types. The quiz was conducted by Sudarshan and myself, with other BC members chipping in from time to time. The questions (about 150 of them) were set by BC comic enthusiasts, ranging from Indian comics, Western superheroes, Graphic Novels, Disneylanders, Franco-Belgian comics and so on.

Comic-phile Shubhashis won the title of "Starocomix" in a 3 person playoff, triumphing over some worthy contenders, which included a couple of very good schoolkids.

Thanks to all who came, all the BC members who provided questions, and those that were able to help out during the two hour event.

If you have any feedback, please leave them in the comments. I personally enjoyed this style of 'walk-in-the-park' quizzing, which is very similar to our BC sessions.

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Previous announcement

When? 6-8 pm. Saturday, 17th November
Where? Landmark Bookstore, Moledina Road, Pune.(opposite Magnum/Kakade Mall)
Prizes? Lots of goodies courtesy Landmark. Children will receive extra kindness from us!

We are doing a Comics Quiz for our partners Landmark , the brilliant bookstore at Moledina Road, in their store. So if you know your Popeye from your Tom and Jerry and your Asterix from your Tintin - do drop in!

It will be an informal interactive audience quiz, we'll be asking questions and throwing out prizes. No writing, no teams, no "big organised quiz". We make up the rules as we go along, and have lots of fun in the process.

Hope to see you there, with friends, family, children, parents, grandparents.(I don't think Landmark allows pets inside!)

Whodunits - BCQC November Open

Quizmaster: J. Ramanand

Date: 4th November

Format : Written elims. Top 6 teams go through. Next 6 teams play a playoff. Top 3 teams get chosen, and each of these 6 people are randomly assigned to a team which has already qualified.

Results: (Team names assigned by QM, after innovative murder devices)

1st place : 85 Conch Shells (Niranjan, Harish, Vishal)
2nd place : 65 Armadillos (Anupam, Akhil, Rachana)
3rd place : 55 Bonsai (Meghshyam, Samrat, Anand)
4th place : Designer Jeans (Aditya Gadre, Salil Bijur, Vikas)
5th place : Exploding Cows (Abhishek, Meghana, Amit)
6th place : Godfathers (Gaurav Singh, Yasho Tamaskar, Venkat)

Notes:

The day started off with a few innovations in the elims itself. Like CAT 2005, this elims introduced "differential" marking for the first time. Elims sheets were separate from the answer sheet, an innovation which enabled participants to keep the elims sheet and facilitated quicker(and some might say more accurate) correction. The finalists were chosen as described above.

Playoffs: This went on for about half an hour, had out-of-turn written responses (for closeup-confident teams) and regular passing for the yellowing rest. Scoring was also accordingly modified.

Finals: A 44 question final promised enough masala packed in every question to cause headache to most teams. Lots of brilliant questions, a few new areas touched upon - and cascading presentation of each connect element made clear a quiz which had been made with such painstaking detail that would've made Margaret Mitchell proud. This quiz was crafted more than set. Everyone had a thoroughly brain-rackingly good time. The experience of grizzled-hair teams like NP / BVHK or Samrat, Meghashyam made them the fair horses right from the start. But team Armadillos came up with some inspired answers and seemed to prosper near the middle of the quiz, when most teams were surrendering to mental exhaustion. Team Designer Jeans too made up some ground near the end with some good answers. Overall, decent showing from the on-stage teams - though no one was really on fire.

However, there were a few "buts" as usual. By 7pm mental fatigue, large average passing lengths and dwindling audiences meant that though the last 10 questions still remained, the QM chose to rush past them ("in the interest of general human rights") meaning that a lot of the good work was to no avail, as teams feigned thinking while dreaming of food. It all ended in a rather sombre mood of finality, with some teams "dazed and confused" and others in pseudo-eureka moments of having discovered a "flaw" in IR.

Overall, somehow though the quiz was excellent in itself - the experience seems to lead us towards another cusp in the BCQC development cycle, where we have been forced to re-evaluate what exactly we want to do and how to go about doing it.

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[Request from Ramanand]: Since I may reuse the questions for a Bombay Quiz Club session, I request any commentators to refrain from specifically mentioning any answer keywords. Harish, I have modified your comment accordingly.